His watch broke when he punched the wall.
It stopped at eight-oh-five
He caught the bus at nine, sat numb
While it wound around the Poplar streets
To home.
He put away the cot. He wrapped
The baby-stuff in blankets, shut it in
To drawers and cupboards, anywhere away.
***
He phoned his parents, phoned hers,
Told them, curt:
“She had a fever. At the hospital, they couldn’t find
A foetal heartbeat.”
He rang two friends, asked them
To tell whoever – not to have
The visits with the baby clothes and small
Stuffed toys, and smiles, and coos, and “Boy or Girl?”
Not to have.
He poured a glass of whisky, stared at it
Went to his bed and wept.
***
On Thursday morning he went back up
To
From some ward where she had
Been drugged asleep.
A pessary to start the labour;
An epidural to make her numb,
Then on they went
To a place they hadn’t ever dreamed about.
Who does?
One baby in a thousand is still born.
They’d thought about a catalogue of
Bad things. Never death.
***
A living baby struggles to be born,
A living child shouts at the light
And as it shouts, its skin,
Grown in wet dark, begins to glow
Their tiny boy stayed greyish,
Perfect but dead.
***
He held his child’s hand.
“What a bastard thing, eh son?
What a bastard, bastard thing.”
Christopher Lilly,
February 2008.
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